France’s Macron to lead ceremony marking 80 years since Nazi raid on Jewish orphanage

French President Emmanuel Macron will later today mark 80 years since Nazi forces raided a Jewish orphanage in the southeast of France and sent almost all its occupants to extermination camps.

A handful of former residents of the orphanage in the village of Izieu are to attend the ceremony headed by Macron, one of a string of events he is leading this year as France marks eight decades since the key penultimate year of the Holocaust.

On April 6, 1944, the 44 Jewish children aged four to 12 then hosted in the orphanage were rounded up by the Gestapo with their seven instructors, also Jewish.

The raid was carried out on the orders of Klaus Barbie, the notorious Nazi known as the “Butcher of Lyon.” Barbie fled to South America after the war but was extradited from Bolivia to France in 1983 and in 1987 was sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of crimes against humanity. He died in prison in 1991.

All the Izieu victims were deported to the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland or Reval in Estonia. Only one instructor survived.

Sunday’s event will see the celebration of “the commitment of those who stood up against Nazism by welcoming the victims of persecution, and of those who opposed the abomination of republican values, by bringing the executioner Klaus Barbie to justice,” the French presidency says.